Spain`s `La Pasionaria` Fights Less At Age 90

December 17, 1985|By Sarah Nicholson, United Press International

MADRID, SPAIN — Frail and white-haired, today she would not stand out in a group of aging women strolling in a Spanish village. But her tough and fiery oratory once made her a revolutionary heroine to some -- and a ``Bolshevik witch`` to others.

Nearly 40 years have passed since Dolores Ibarruri, ``La Pasionaria,`` rallied Republican troops and international brigades with the cry ``No pasaran,`` (they shall not pass).

And it has been decades since she formed a brigade of female volunteers to fight on the Madrid front in the 1936-39 civil war against the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco.

``It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees,`` she urged them.

Ibarruri, born 90 years ago on Dec. 9 in the mining town of Gallarta, still has the revolutionary fire that inspired Ernest Hemingway`s character Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

``Continue the struggle to wipe out capitalism, at whatever cost, at whatever price,`` she told a group of well-wishers at the start of a week-long string of events to celebrate her 90th birthday.

But she now has little say in the day-to-day workings of the Spanish Communist Party that she helped to found in 1922.

As party president, she attends meetings of the central committee but often nods off, and rarely intervenes in policy-making.

Her return to Spain in 1977 after 38 years of exile in Moscow was hailed as a symbol of reconciliation of ``the two Spains.``

The Franco regime had pictured her as the embodiment of evil. School children were taught that she had murdered priests during the civil war by biting their jugular veins.

Ibarruri`s praise of the good life in the Soviet Union, however, made her a liability to comrades who were pushing their image as a Eurocommunist party, free of Moscow`s dictates.

Since legalization of the Communist Party in April 1977, infighting between old guard Stalinists and the younger Eurocommunists has splintered the party, making it a marginal political force.

But Ibarruri stays above the fray.

Today she easily recalls her childhood in a Basque mining town -- ``I am the daughter, wife and mother of miners,`` she says proudly -- but her voice trails off forgetfully when she speaks of modern Spain.

``My great dream was to become a teacher, but in those days that was not possible for a miner`s daughter,`` she said.

Poverty forced her to quit school at 14. She worked for a dressmaker, as a cafe waitress and for a time earned her living selling sardines from village to village, carrying the fish in a tray on her head.

Devoutly Catholic as a young girl, she turned to socialism shortly after her marriage in 1916 to Julian Ruiz, from whom she later separated.

Socialism, she said, had helped her to see life ``not as a swamp but as a battlefield.``

She signed her first political tracts ``La Pasionaria`` because, she explains, they were written in Easter Week -- in Spanish, the week of ``La Pasion.``